Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

March 21, 2017

Ask Jelly bought by Pinterest, promptly closes

If you haven't taken a look at Ask Jelly yet, you've really missed your chance. I'm betting you probably haven't, which may well be one of the reasons that it's closing. Basically it was a Question and Answer service; people would register, indicate their area of expertise and when people asked questions, they would be pushed through to the appropriate person to answer them - for free. The answer would be posted, people would say thanks, everyone was happy.

This type of resource,with the obvious exception of Quora simply doesn't work. We've seen it tried and fail with ChaCha and Mahalo. Back in April 2016 I said that it would fail, and it has - less than a year later. I love the phrase that was used in the email telling us that it was closing: "The spirit of Jelly will continue to thrive within the machinery of Pinterest, but Jelly on iOS and askjelly.com themselves will no longer be standalone services." In other words, we've been bought out and have sunk without trace. These services rely on the ability of people to provide useful, timely and authoritative information, but the people who can really do that are, for the most part, busy doing that in their professional lives. It's great if people want to help other people, but the feeling of satisfaction is generally self created.

It's a shame, but it was obviously going to happen, and if anyone else is foolish enough to try it, their effort will fail as well. Let's move on from this broken model now, shall we?

It's a good question Emily! I think because it's actually quite low tech, and people can upvote or downvote the answers. It also doesn't have a huge opinion of itself the way Buzz Stone did of Jelly, trying to make out it's the savior of the world.